The EUROmicroMOOC is a project that the Spanish Society for Microbiology (SEM) started with support from FEMS. It is the first world-wide open access microbiology course delivered through Twitter.

It runs from 2 October to 15 November, with three topics every week. 21 enthusiastic teachers will provide instruction and learning coordinated around the hashtag: #EUROmicroMOOC

In this context “micro” acknowledges both the subject under focus, microbiology, and also the small 140-character format of a tweet, whereas “MOOC” stands for Massive Online Open Course).

The lectures have each divided their course into 30-40 tweet sized statements, with links to webpages, blogs, news, and plenty of images and videos. Starting at 17:00 UCT/GMT+2 on the day of that course, the tweets go out at a rate of 1 tweet per minute.

 

 

For the 2018 edition:

• 21 courses, by 21 professors, from 18 institutions, in 9 countries across the world
• classes scheduled every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 17:00 (CET) from 2 October to 
15 November                                                    
• tweets will be sent from the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account                                                             
• each course consists of 30-40 tweet sized statements posted at a rate of 1 tweet every minute
• all classes will be in English and the tweets stored online using the open tool Wakelet

The 21 courses will be delivered across the 7 week project through the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account, with more details found here.

 

A Spanish Origin

This global version is the evolution of an idea that was initialised by Ignacio López-Goñi in the midst of the SEM. Their Teaching and Dissemination of Microbiology Group created a twitter MOOC which aimed to deliver microbiology lessons to as many people as possible.

In 2016, a team of 30 researchers from SEM – located in the US, UK, and Spain – delivered 26 lessons on General Microbiology.

The results were impressive: 175,000 people visited the SEM twitter account during the MOOC, the tweets reached a device’s screen over 4 million times, and followers of the SEM account increased by 330%. 62% of the followers were located in Spain and 61% were female.

A second edition was organised in 2017. This edition was aimed at the wider Spanish speaking world, across South America, Mexico, and the USA (and did so successfully, 42% of the audience reached were from these countries).

 

Courses on Offer

Although all courses will be delivered through the @SEMicrobiologia Twitter account, you can also use the information below to check out the teachers involved and the courses on offer for the global 2018 version:

 

Science Communication

Teacher: Tarsha Sturm

Institution: Cabrillo College (USA)

Twitter profile: @tasturm1

Date: 2 October

 

Bacterial surface structures

Teacher: Jenny-Lee Thomassin

Institution: Institut Pasteur (France)

Twitter profile: @JennyThomassin

Date: 3 October

 

Bacterial biofilms

Teacher: Akos T. Kovacs

Institution: DTU Bioengineering (Denmark)

Twitter profile: @EvolvedBiofilm

Date: 4 October

 

Bacterial cooperation

Teacher: Elisa Granato

Institution: University of Oxford (England)

Twitter profile: @Prokaryota

Date: 9 October

 

Space microbiology

Teacher: Marta Cotesao

Institution: German Aerospace Center-DLR (Germany)

Twitter profile: @martacortesao

Date: 10 October

 

Food pathogens

Teacher: Joaquin Giner

Institution: Centro Nacional de Biotecnología CNB-CSIC (Spain)

Twitter profile: @Ginerorama

Date: 11 October

 

Food microbiome

Teacher: Avelino Alvarez-Ordoñez

Institution: University of León (Spain)

Twitter profile: @MetaResistantB

Date: 16 October

 

Gut microbiota

Teacher: Thibault Sana

Institution: Stanford University (USA)

Twitter profile: @ThibGSana

Date: 17 October

 

Antibiotic production

Teacher: Dennis Claessen

Institution: Leiden University (The Netherlands)

Twitter profile: @ClassenLAB

Date: 18 October

 

Antimicrobial resistance

Teacher: Wiep Klaas Smits

Institution: Leiden University (The Netherlands)

Twitter profile: @SmitsLab

Date: 23 October

 

Bacteriophages

Teacher: Andrea Dreusch

Institution: MicroMol GmbH Laboratory (Germany)

Twitter profile: @MicroMol_Lab

Date: 24 October

 

Microbiological warfare

Teacher: Daniel García

Institution: University of Salamanca (Spain)

Twitter profile: @SoyBiotec

Date: 25 October

 

#Vaccineswork

Teacher: Ignacio López-Goñi

Institution: University of Navarra (Spain)

Twitter profile: @microbioblog

Date: 30 October

 

Microbial genomics

Teacher: Alfonso Benitez-Paez

Institution: Instituto de Agroquímica y Tecnología de Alimentos IATA-CSIC (Spain)

Twitter profile: @alfbenpa

Date: 31 October

 

Mobile genetic elements

Teacher: María del Toro Hernando

Institution: Fundación Rioja Salud (Spain)

Twitter profile: @Miss_Salmonella

Date: 1 November

 

Microbial synthetic biology

Teacher: Kris Niño G. Valdehuesa

Institution: Myongji University (South Korea)

Twitter profile: @krisnino86

Date: 6 November

 

Industrial microbiology

Teacher: Manuel Sánchez

Institution: University of Miguel Hernández (Spain)

Twitter profile: @ManoloSanchezA

Date: 7 November

 

Virulence and pathogenicity

Teacher: Jesus L. Romalde

Institution: University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

Twitter profile: @baylorete / @gimikrobios

Date: 8 November

 

Bacterial pathogenomics

Teacher: Marta Zapotoczna

Institution: Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Science (Poland)

Twitter profile: @MartaZapotoczna

Date: 13 November

 

The microbial path to cancer

Teacher: Jorge Garcia-Lara

Institution: University of Central Lancashire (UK)

Twitter profile: @GarciaLaraClan

Date: 14 November

 

Thinking outside the box

Teacher: Félix Sangari

Institution: Instituto de Biomedicina y Biotecnologia IBBTEC (Spain)

Twitter profile: @LaMicroMola

Date: 15 November

 

More details here.